Tim Sweeney reveals the first details about Unreal Engine 6 in an interview. According to him, the first preview versions are expected to be released in two to three years.
Epic’s Unreal Engine 5 has been available since 2022 and is considered one of the most accessible and graphically impressive game engines ever. The developer is slowly looking toward the future, and in an interview, Tim Sweeney has now spoken for the first time about the next generation of Unreal Engine.
Unreal Engine 6: First versions planned in 2-3 years
Tim Sweeney is the founder and CEO of Epic Games and, as such, has been involved in the development of the Unreal Engine from the very beginning. In a recent episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, Sweeney spoke in detail about the engine, Fortnite, and the future of gaming.
You can watch the entire episode here:
According to the interview, the first preview versions of Unreal Engine 6 could be available in two to three years. It will likely be a few more years before the first games that fully utilize the engine are released. Therefore, it will hardly be ready before 2028/2029.
The new generation is intended to merge two current development strands. Currently, there are two versions of UE5: one for developers and one for the Fortnite community. In the future, however, there will be one engine for everything.
According to Sweeney, multithreading will also be an important aspect of Unreal Engine 6. To keep development as simple as possible, Epic has opted for single-threading in Unreal Engine 5. This means that only one processor core is used for the entire game simulation.
This approach is beginner-friendly, but also quite inefficient. Most modern CPUs have eight, twelve, or even 16 cores, so it only makes sense to use more of them in the future, even if this means increased complexity in development.
However, Epic does not seem to be in too much of a hurry. After all, Unreal Engine 5 is far from obsolete, as current graphics highlights such as Oblivion Remastered and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 impressively demonstrate.
What do you think? When do you expect Unreal Engine 6 to be released at the earliest?
